Centre sets up panel to draw up roadmap

A high-level working group of the Central government will meet in the first week of April to assess if India can be a 100 per cent electric vehicle country by 2030. It will also attempt to draw up a roadmap for achieving the target, said Piyush Goyal, Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal and New & Renewable Energy.

“We are trying to see whether India can be 100 per cent on electric vehicles by 2030. We are trying to make this progr-amme self-financing by monetising the savings people have from using cheaper electricity to run cars,” said Goyal.

Goyal said the working group will be headed by Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari and include Dharmendra Pradhan, Minister of State for Petroleum and Natural Gas, and Prakash Javadekar, Minister of State for Environment.

“We will try to work out whether we can give the cars for free initially and people can pay back out of the savings from not using petroleum products,” he elaborated. The target of becoming a 100 per cent electric vehicle is ambitious. Data indicate that there are over 200 million vehicles on Indian roads.

As on January 2015, the number of electric vehicles globally was around 6.65 lakh, according to the International Energy Agency’s Electric Vehicle Initiative. Global estimates peg electric vehicles to hit 30 million only by 2030.